Personal Growth Work

Poornima starts by listing out some of the common excuses, calling out “not enough time” as the major scapegoat. She then explore a couple of more “real” reasons:

The first, is an organizational view that views training time as a luxury.

The second, is a personal tendency to choose grunt work over growth work.

While I find the structure of the piece a bit odd, I really like the powerful distinction that Poornima creates between “grunt work” and “growth work”. Even though conceptionally it’s not that different from Dan Pink’s “algorithmic work” and “creative work”, I think Poornima’s terms are more accessible and more likely to motivate people to take a more inquisitive look at the way in which they spend their time at work, and hopefully take subsequent action to alter the status quo.